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> void-pointer + size to it How do I make sure they always stay in sync ? (adding removing elements) Because the ever increasing number of CVE's where brillia

> void-pointer + size to it How do I make sure they always stay in sync ? (adding removing elements) Because the ever increasing number of CVE's where brilliant programmers who screw this up, says doing this manually is prone to error. Sure you could do everything without generics. But its a lot more error prone. Generics can in addition with other language construct provide better safety. Generics also provide a tradeoff, that library code is more complicated, but its usage its easier to read.

jstimpfle 5y ago
You don't. A pointer is a pointer, an int is an int. Memory is memory. Dynamic Arrays that support "adding or removing" elements are a high-level feature that don't mesh well with direct memory manipulation. If you are really really concerned you can try to code in Rust with its ownership tracking system. Otherwise, try to write simple enough code and test it as good as you can. You can use a language or compiler switch that at least supports "fat pointers" for implicit bounds checking, but this won't deal with reallocations. But in general "systems programming" means "buffer processing" i.e. a lot of "streaming" and most buffers are short lived - they are never overwritten and you drop them soon after they were created - or they never change in size. (reallocation incurs unnecessary copies, and there are many good reasons to chunk large data sets up into fixed-width sizes). All this makes "stay in sync" very much a non-problem. I haven't had to worry about this in years. It's almost an academic exercise that only exists to prove that we need garbage collection ;-) > Because the ever increasing number of CVE's where brilliant programmers who screw this up, says doing this manually is prone to error. If you code in a memory unsafe language like C, things can go horribly wrong and your code can be exploited. If you code in a memory safe language, you can end up with horribly slow and unmaintainable code and you might still be exploited. > Generics can in addition with other language construct provide better safety. Better than using a hash table with generics, is not using a hash table at all...
- ncmncm 5y ago
  Or, best, not even programming at all? Or, in practice, hiring somebody who actually understands how to program, understands what makes a library or language a good choice, and understands how to get the most value from both, without insane blinders.

jstimpfle 5y ago

You don't. A pointer is a pointer, an int is an int. Memory is memory. Dynamic Arrays that support "adding or removing" elements are a high-level feature that don't mesh well with direct memory manipulation. If you are really really concerned you can try to code in Rust with its ownership tracking system. Otherwise, try to write simple enough code and test it as good as you can. You can use a language or compiler switch that at least supports "fat pointers" for implicit bounds checking, but this won't deal with reallocations. But in general "systems programming" means "buffer processing" i.e. a lot of "streaming" and most buffers are short lived - they are never overwritten and you drop them soon after they were created - or they never change in size. (reallocation incurs unnecessary copies, and there are many good reasons to chunk large data sets up into fixed-width sizes). All this makes "stay in sync" very much a non-problem. I haven't had to worry about this in years. It's almost an academic exercise that only exists to prove that we need garbage collection ;-) > Because the ever increasing number of CVE's where brilliant programmers who screw this up, says doing this manually is prone to error. If you code in a memory unsafe language like C, things can go horribly wrong and your code can be exploited. If you code in a memory safe language, you can end up with horribly slow and unmaintainable code and you might still be exploited. > Generics can in addition with other language construct provide better safety. Better than using a hash table with generics, is not using a hash table at all...

ncmncm 5y ago
Or, best, not even programming at all? Or, in practice, hiring somebody who actually understands how to program, understands what makes a library or language a good choice, and understands how to get the most value from both, without insane blinders.